War against terrorism must end

By Raf Sanchez, Washington

In a major speech to military and political leaders, Mr Obama said the US could not wage "a boundless global war on terror" but must face a new reality where threats come from regional jihadists and home-grown extremists.

"Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organisations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end," Mr Obama said. "That's what history advises. That's what our democracy demands."

As he announced the most significant shift in US counter-terrorism since the fall of the World Trade Centre, Mr Obama said he would restrict his own signature policy of ordering drone strikes around the world.

Although insisting that the targeted killing programme was legal and effective, the President said the US must also exercise "the discipline to constrain that power – or risk abusing it".

Under a new directive signed this week drone strikes would be limited only to those cases where the target represented a "continuing and imminent threat" to the US. He also insisted on "near certainty" that no civilians would be killed before authorising strikes, saying for him and his commanders the deaths of innocents would "haunt us as long as we live".

Barry Obama and best friend's 'foxy' prom date 23 May 2013

While the rate of strikes has fallen sharply in Mr Obama's second term, he has already ordered more than 350 attacks compared to only around 50 under his predecessor George W Bush.

Mr Obama declared himself open to the idea of a special court or independent body tasked with reviewing the legality of each strike, although he offered no specifics of how this would work.

Under the directive, the US must show it has exhausted all option for capturing the terrorists before launching a strike but Mr Obama cautioned that special operations raids like the one against Osama bin Laden "cannot be the norm".

The administration's tendency to kill rather than capture has led to criticism it is failing to extract valuable intelligence from targets.

In a significant shift, the US military will now take the lead on drones rather than the more secretive CIA. The military would be the key authority in both the active theatre of war in Afghanistan and more legally complex areas like tribal Pakistan.

Mr Obama once again called for Congress to allow him to fulfil his 2009 promise to close the controversial prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, which he said had "become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law".

He was repeatedly heckled by Medea Benjamin, an activist with the progressive group Code Pink, who called for the immediate closure of Guantánamo and said "drones are making us less safe".

"The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to," Mr Obama said. "These are tough issues and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong."

Of the 166 men still being detained at the facility in Cuba, 86 are currently slated for release, including more than 50 from Yemen.

Mr Obama said he would restart transferring cleared detainees to Yemen, a process halted in early 2010, and that he would appoint two senior officials "whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries".

He emphasised the enormous cost of running the prison site pointing out that the US spends nearly $800,000 per detainee - or 30 times more than it would cost to imprison them on the mainland.

Pointing to the current hunger strike at Guantánamo, where dozens of detainees are being force fed through tubes, Mr Obama asked: "Is that who we are? Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?"

He also addressed the recent controversy of government investigators monitoring reporters' phone records saying he was "troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable".

His speech came a day after the US confirmed for the first time it had killed four Americans in drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, but said only one – Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born al-Qaeda cleric – had been deliberately targeted.

Aides said Mr Obama, a former constitutional law professor who ran on a civil liberties platform in 2008, had been looking forward to giving the speech and had been working on the text for months.